MORE than 7,000 residents of suburban Limerick will officially become city dwellers today.
A boundary extension order signed yesterday by Environment Minister John Gormley transfers huge areas on the northside of the river Shannon from Co Limerick into the administrative area of Limerick City Council.
At the signing in Moyross, the Mayor of Limerick, Cllr Ger Fahy, said the extension would be a major boost to the economic growth and well-being of the urban area. The extension was recommended by former Dublin City Manager John Fitzgerald in his report to Government on the regeneration of Moyross and Southill.
This recommendation was sanctioned by Mr Gormley and supported by Limerick City Council and Limerick County Council. The extension will increase Limerick city’s area by almost 50%, bringing in all of Moyross, Caherdavin and the rural hinterland of the city’s northside up to the Co Clare border. Limerick city’s urban population will be increased to almost 60,000.
The last boundary change was in 1950 when Limerick’s first cabinet minister Michael Keyes granted the city its only boundary extension in the 20th century.
Mayor Fahy acknowledged the role played by Limerick County Council in this boundary extension.
Mr Gormley said he was very proud to have a hand in making the order.
“I am determined to see through the actions set out in John Fitzgerald’s report and this is another concrete action delivered,” he added.
He said the order will help reinforce the substantial momentum being generated to establish the conditions for a lasting and sustainable improvement in the lives of the people of Moyross, its wider neighbourhood and the city and region as a whole.
He said this is an exciting time for Limerick.
He said: “I particularly welcome the depth of co-operation between Limerick City Council and Limerick County Council on this issue.”
Irish Examiner
www.buckplanning.ie
Saturday, 1 March 2008
Cork suburban rail project wins Irish planning award
PLANS to develop a new commuter railway station on Cork’s northside have been approved.
The station, to be built just outside Blackpool, is a key part of the suburban rail network element of the 2001-2020 Cork Area Strategic Plan (CASP), which won a national planning award on Thursday.
Cork County Council took the Irish Planning Institute’s (IPI) Planning Achievement Award for its work on developing a suburban rail network around the city as part of CASP.
Work has started on the reopening of the Cork to Midleton rail line — the first new railway line to open in Ireland for more than 100 years.
And within the last few days, city planners have given Iarnród Eireann permission to build another commuter station on the site of the former Kilbarry station off Dublin Hill, on the Dublin-Cork railway line.
The station will include a 100-space park and ride facility and stands for 20 bicycles.
Competition judges said the council’s rail plans — which also includes commuter rail stations at Monard near Blarney and at Glounthane — will result “in the revitalisation of a number of key towns and villages while promoting the move to more sustainable modes of transport”.
CASP coordinator Dan Looney welcomed the award. But while the railway caught the public imagination, he said a lot of other work has taken place.
There has been massive investment in rail infrastructure, such as increased train frequencies on the Cork to Dublin inter-city route and suburban services like Cork to Cobh. There are also plans to build park and ride facilities at Dunkettle and Carrigrohane, he said.
The council’s rail project now goes forward as Ireland’s entry in the European Planning Awards, which will be hosted by the IPI in Dublin Castle in October.
IPI president Andrew Hind said the awards were “a celebration of all that is best in Irish planning”.
The county council also won a conservation award for the Guidance Note for the Appraisal of Historic Gardens, Demesnes, Estates and their Settings.
Irish Examiner
www.buckplanning.ie
The station, to be built just outside Blackpool, is a key part of the suburban rail network element of the 2001-2020 Cork Area Strategic Plan (CASP), which won a national planning award on Thursday.
Cork County Council took the Irish Planning Institute’s (IPI) Planning Achievement Award for its work on developing a suburban rail network around the city as part of CASP.
Work has started on the reopening of the Cork to Midleton rail line — the first new railway line to open in Ireland for more than 100 years.
And within the last few days, city planners have given Iarnród Eireann permission to build another commuter station on the site of the former Kilbarry station off Dublin Hill, on the Dublin-Cork railway line.
The station will include a 100-space park and ride facility and stands for 20 bicycles.
Competition judges said the council’s rail plans — which also includes commuter rail stations at Monard near Blarney and at Glounthane — will result “in the revitalisation of a number of key towns and villages while promoting the move to more sustainable modes of transport”.
CASP coordinator Dan Looney welcomed the award. But while the railway caught the public imagination, he said a lot of other work has taken place.
There has been massive investment in rail infrastructure, such as increased train frequencies on the Cork to Dublin inter-city route and suburban services like Cork to Cobh. There are also plans to build park and ride facilities at Dunkettle and Carrigrohane, he said.
The council’s rail project now goes forward as Ireland’s entry in the European Planning Awards, which will be hosted by the IPI in Dublin Castle in October.
IPI president Andrew Hind said the awards were “a celebration of all that is best in Irish planning”.
The county council also won a conservation award for the Guidance Note for the Appraisal of Historic Gardens, Demesnes, Estates and their Settings.
Irish Examiner
www.buckplanning.ie
Mayo Power replies to appeals
Mayo Power Ltd, which is planning a controversial mixed fuel combined heat and power plant at the former Asahi site in north Mayo, has responded to four appeals lodged to An Bord Pleanála. In its submission the directors of Mayo Power say one of the aims of the proposal is to utilise largely native and local fuels - notably peat and renewables - to generate electricity in the area.
Claiming the initiative will improve the electricity supply in the area, it says it will also reduce dependency on imported fossil fuels and bring jobs to a region which has suffered from depopulation.
The Irish Times
www.buckplanning.ie
Claiming the initiative will improve the electricity supply in the area, it says it will also reduce dependency on imported fossil fuels and bring jobs to a region which has suffered from depopulation.
The Irish Times
www.buckplanning.ie
Board says yes to Mackey's plan
An Bord Pleanála has ruled in favour of an apartment development at Mackey's Garden Centre and Harry Byrne's and 1 Castle Close on Castlepark Road, Dalkey, Co Dublin. Wesley Curran's Otranto Properties will build 56 apartments in two four-storey buildings and a single storey building with a gym, janitor's office and basement 16-metre swimming pool.
The board ruled that the development would not unduly impact on the character of the surrounding area or adjoining residential amenity and would be acceptable in terms of traffic safety and convenience.
Irish Times
www.buckplanning.ie
The board ruled that the development would not unduly impact on the character of the surrounding area or adjoining residential amenity and would be acceptable in terms of traffic safety and convenience.
Irish Times
www.buckplanning.ie
'Brian Boru' pub plan rejected as excessive
AN BORD Pleanála has overturned planning permission for the partial demolition of a pub mentioned in James Joyce's Ulysses , to make way for a six-storey apartment development because of its "excessive scale and unsympathetic design".
The planning board also said that the proposal by Michael Hedigan, the owner of Hedigans, a 19th century landmark pub on Prospect Road, Glasnevin (also known as the "Brian Boru"), failed to respect the character of the building and would be "a discordant element in the streetscape".
Michael Hedigan was previously granted permission by Dublin City Council to redevelop the pub into 57 apartments in three blocks, the tallest being six storeys. This would have involved demolishing the rear of the pub to make way for a four-storey extension which would incorporate a pub, community room, two apartments and a duplex.
The planning permission was subsequently appealed by Court Management Company which said the development would overshadow and overlook apartments in its complex to the north and impede views of the canal.
Hedigans features in Ulysses as the pub where mourners stop on the way to the cemetery. The pub is reputed to have been built on the site where Brian Boru camped before the Battle of Clontarf.
The Irish Times
www.buckplanning.ie
The planning board also said that the proposal by Michael Hedigan, the owner of Hedigans, a 19th century landmark pub on Prospect Road, Glasnevin (also known as the "Brian Boru"), failed to respect the character of the building and would be "a discordant element in the streetscape".
Michael Hedigan was previously granted permission by Dublin City Council to redevelop the pub into 57 apartments in three blocks, the tallest being six storeys. This would have involved demolishing the rear of the pub to make way for a four-storey extension which would incorporate a pub, community room, two apartments and a duplex.
The planning permission was subsequently appealed by Court Management Company which said the development would overshadow and overlook apartments in its complex to the north and impede views of the canal.
Hedigans features in Ulysses as the pub where mourners stop on the way to the cemetery. The pub is reputed to have been built on the site where Brian Boru camped before the Battle of Clontarf.
The Irish Times
www.buckplanning.ie
Locals appeal €230m Cabinteely plan
PLANNING PERMISSION for a €230 million residential development at Barrington Tower on the Brennanstown Road in Cabinteely, Dublin 18, has been appealed by local residents to An Bord Pleanála.
Estate agent Bill Doyle who bought the 8.6-acre site in 2005 for a then record price of €36 million - €21 million over the guide price - got planning permission from Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council to build 158 houses and apartments.
The scheme is designed as a mix of 25 detached houses, 12 semi-detached houses, six terraced houses and 109 apartments.
However Cabinteely and District Residents' Association is one of two parties appealing planning permission for the development, saying it would be premature pending the preparation of a local area plan.
The residents' association says the development would have a "detrimental impact" on traffic on Brennanstown Road and would particularly worsen traffic problems in Cabinteely village.
It says that building a large scale development that exits out onto "a poorly constructed road, even after the proposed traffic calming measures" would be dangerous and would impact on the junction between Old Bray Road and Brennanstown Road which, it says, is already "at saturation point".
Paul Fitzpatrick, who lives in a cottage near the site, says the density of the proposed development is excessive when taken in the context of Barrington Tower, an early 19th century folly and protected structure attached to a 1950s mock-Georgian house.
In his appeal letter to the board, he says the modern design of development is "out of keeping with existing buildings on the site and buildings in the surrounding area". Describing the house type proposed to the south-west of his property as "overly complicated with an unnecessary number of materials used", he also objects to the design, scale and height of the interconnected apartment blocks which he says are inappropriate in that location.
Barrington Tower dates from the 1830s and was built as a viewing point from which to enjoy the land. He says the four-to-six-storey apartment building at the eastern and southern ends of the site "divorces the tower from the distant landscape of which there would historically have been views".
A first party appeal was submitted to An Bord Pleanála by Bill Doyle against a number of planning conditions imposed by Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council. Also part of Bill Doyle's proposal for the site are two community rooms within a five-storey building, a crèche.
The site would also have pedestrian access to the new Luas station when the Green Luas line is extended to Cherrywood in 2009.
Barrington Tower takes its name from the Barrington family whose remains are buried in the Quaker graveyard that adjoins the property. The tower still looks out over an almost rural landscape with views of Carrickmines Valley and the Leadmines chimney.
The two-storey house was added in the 1950s by the Maguire family, who owned the Brown Thomas department store.
The Irish Times
www.buckplanning.ie
Estate agent Bill Doyle who bought the 8.6-acre site in 2005 for a then record price of €36 million - €21 million over the guide price - got planning permission from Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council to build 158 houses and apartments.
The scheme is designed as a mix of 25 detached houses, 12 semi-detached houses, six terraced houses and 109 apartments.
However Cabinteely and District Residents' Association is one of two parties appealing planning permission for the development, saying it would be premature pending the preparation of a local area plan.
The residents' association says the development would have a "detrimental impact" on traffic on Brennanstown Road and would particularly worsen traffic problems in Cabinteely village.
It says that building a large scale development that exits out onto "a poorly constructed road, even after the proposed traffic calming measures" would be dangerous and would impact on the junction between Old Bray Road and Brennanstown Road which, it says, is already "at saturation point".
Paul Fitzpatrick, who lives in a cottage near the site, says the density of the proposed development is excessive when taken in the context of Barrington Tower, an early 19th century folly and protected structure attached to a 1950s mock-Georgian house.
In his appeal letter to the board, he says the modern design of development is "out of keeping with existing buildings on the site and buildings in the surrounding area". Describing the house type proposed to the south-west of his property as "overly complicated with an unnecessary number of materials used", he also objects to the design, scale and height of the interconnected apartment blocks which he says are inappropriate in that location.
Barrington Tower dates from the 1830s and was built as a viewing point from which to enjoy the land. He says the four-to-six-storey apartment building at the eastern and southern ends of the site "divorces the tower from the distant landscape of which there would historically have been views".
A first party appeal was submitted to An Bord Pleanála by Bill Doyle against a number of planning conditions imposed by Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council. Also part of Bill Doyle's proposal for the site are two community rooms within a five-storey building, a crèche.
The site would also have pedestrian access to the new Luas station when the Green Luas line is extended to Cherrywood in 2009.
Barrington Tower takes its name from the Barrington family whose remains are buried in the Quaker graveyard that adjoins the property. The tower still looks out over an almost rural landscape with views of Carrickmines Valley and the Leadmines chimney.
The two-storey house was added in the 1950s by the Maguire family, who owned the Brown Thomas department store.
The Irish Times
www.buckplanning.ie
History in need of a new home
The National Museum, the National Gallery, the National Library . . . Dublin is filled with museums, yet none records the remarkable history of the city itself, writes Arminta Wallace
You might imagine that Ireland is up to its elbows in museums. And we do have a plethora of highly regarded specialist collections, from the Famine Museum at Strokestown, Co Roscommon, to the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin; from the Irish National Stud and Horse Museum in Kildare to the Ulster Folklore and Transport Museum in Hollywood, Co Down. There are the wonderful Waterford Museum of Treasures and the Museum of Country Life in Co Mayo. But what we don't have - what, in truth, many of us don't even miss - is a museum for the city of Dublin.
Most Dubliners are probably blissfully unaware that the Dublin Civic Museum, which was housed in the former City Assembly House on South William Street, has been closed for about five years now. The museum died a quiet death after a long slide into apathy and neglect; but even in its heyday, it hardly qualified as one of the city's premier attractions.
If Dublin is serious about its aspiration to become one of Europe's top tourist destinations, however, shouldn't we have a museum to tell the history of our capital? Definitely, says Paul Doyle of the Irish Museums Association (IMA) - and not just for the tourists. "We've been pushing for a museum of Dublin for probably seven or eight years at this stage," he says. "We think that, like any capital city, it has stories to tell. Serious cities around the world all have their own museums, and the people of Dublin deserve one as well."
The IMA, which has a seat on Dublin City Council's Strategic Policy Committee on Youth, Art and Sport, is about to deliver to the council yet another submission which will make these and other points in favour of its proposal. "The council invited us to do this, which is a reasonable start," says Doyle. It will, nevertheless, be an uphill climb. Ask the average Dubliner about museums and they'll point to the National Museum, the National Gallery, the National Library, the Hugh Lane, Kilmainham Gaol, the Dublin Jewish Museum - even, perhaps, to the Guinness Hopstore, to Dublinia and to Viking Splash. Fine institutions all, but none of them is doing the job of a city museum, simply because none of them is a city museum.
So what should a city museum be doing? "City museums," says Hugh Maguire of the Heritage Council, "have a particular role to play because cities are always places where people are moving in and moving out - places for discourse and the exchange of ideas. We're inclined to think of that as a modern phenomenon - but down through the centuries, Dublin has been the interface for all that cultural interchange. And there's nowhere where that story is actually presented, either for the people who live here or for the thousands and thousands of newcomers to the city in recent years.
"You only see what you get in Dublin - and there's very little to even tell you what you're seeing. You see Georgian architecture and bits of the river and so on; but there's very little that actually explains it to you. There's no one to interpret the town planning or the growth of the city. There are sporadic exhibitions here and there in the various institutions, but they don't consider the history of the city as a single narrative," says Maguire.
ONE OF THE first questions which would have to be decided is how wide-ranging this narrative should be. Traditionally, Dublin has been regarded as "the city between the canals", but in recent years, it has spread its wings much further, and shows every sign of continuing to do so. There's also the question of how a collection would be arranged - should it start with the oldest signs of settlement and move forwards, or start with the city everyone can recognise and move backwards in time, turning a museum visit into an exercise in celebratory excavation? Should it concentrate on preservation and heritage, or try to document change by targeting the various immigrant cultures whose members are just beginning to make their cultural marks on the city?
Such questions would need to be thoroughly aired and debated if a civic museum were to be truly "civic". But first, as Paul Doyle points out, we need to make a definite commitment to a city museum; there's not much point in people working out, for example, a comprehensive collections policy if the whole project comes to nought once again. How difficult can it be to get such a commitment in place?
Other cities have done it: at one end of the spectrum, Beijing has just spent $150 million (€101 million) on a brand-new, seven-storey keynote building to house its history, with 13 themed exhibitions including a full-sized reconstruction of an old business street. Closer to home, most of the larger European cities have urban museums, including Liverpool, Glasgow and Luxembourg, whose Musee d'Histoire de la Ville de Luxembourg, situated in four beautifully restored buildings in the old city, prides itself on its modernist touches and cutting-edge interactive displays.
There are clearly as many blueprints for city museums as there are plans for city transport systems - but the message for anyone setting up a city museum in the 21st century seems to be: do it properly or don't do it at all. "Museums must fulfil a full range of purposes," says Hugh Maguire. "Every museum worth its salt needs vast amounts of storage space, properly climate-controlled rooms, rooms for documentation, rooms for education. Two or three front-of-house rooms just won't solve the problem."
Geraldine Walsh of Dublin Civic Trust points to the private museums in London - including Sir John Soane's mind-boggling life-sized cabinet of curiosities in Holborn, or the Geffrye Museum in Shoreditch, which presents a series of domestic interiors from the Elizabethan era to the present-day - as offering constructive examples of what could be done in Dublin. "When you come out of the Geffrye, everything you see in London is more meaningful to you. The city is a different place," she says. "Children go in and learn about, say, Windsor chairs. They draw them and maybe model them with cardboard and little bits of timber."
This is the kind of "hands-on" approach which, Walsh suggests, helps bring history to life. "What has happened in Dublin is that there's a total deficit between the eye and the place. Wealth has overtaken us over the past 20 years, so that we're in the process of discarding everything." She suggests that current trends in interior design, such as the idea of the "minimalist household", are exacerbating the problem. "Where before, objects were packed away in boxes somewhere, now people are getting rid of almost everything. The mark of a sophisticated society is that the collective memory is recorded in all its facets, from folklore right through to art and music."
SO IF A CITY museum is such a good thing, why haven't we got one in Dublin? Some say it's because we haven't evolved to the stage where we can take a cool, balanced look at our history. Others point to an overall archaeological bias in Irish museums culture. "If it's not dug out of the ground, the system isn't interested," says Hugh Maguire. "We have this problem with arts and crafts in Ireland as well - and in literature. Priority is given to certain areas, and from the 18th century up to now, priority has been given to the antiquarian in Irish studies. Whereas quite commonplace artefacts from earlier periods are seen as rarefied and worthy of scholarly regard, there's an attitude which verges on contempt for the tangible culture of more recent times."
As the Irish Museums Association gears up for its annual conference, which begins in Wexford today, one of its keynote speakers might well agree with those sentiments. The head of English heritage and former director of the British science museum, Neil Cossons, has spent many years trying to persuade the powers that be to save the architecture of the industrial revolution, from maintenance depots through workers' cottages to dark, satanic mills - with mixed results.
One of the points he will be making in his address is that museums have moved "from the twilight to the spotlight". Cossons will examine the tenacity of the whole idea of museums, which, he says, is one of the longest-lasting cultural phenomena in human history. "Part of it has to do with the fact that museums are capable of reflecting back to people something about their own lives. There seems to be a need on the part of communities to have their past about them. It's a very powerful human emotion and we now have the wealth, prosperity and intelligence to be able to do it."
Cossons identifies the desire for city museums as a significant trend in this ongoing boom. Liverpool and Bristol are building new ones, he says, and the Museum of London is undergoing a major expansion and overhaul. The case for a city museum can't, as a glance at Dublin City Council's excellent website will show, but made in isolation. Supporters will have to argue their point against supporters of other initiatives, which range from the biodiversity survey 2008-2012 through fair-trade fortnight to the provision of new football pitches and the ban on heavy good vehicles. Dublin, seen from this wide perspective, is a multi-layered, chaotic, ever-changing slice of life. But then, isn't that exactly why we need a museum of the city?
The Irish Museums Association's annual conference begins today in Wexford and continues until March 2nd. The theme is "New Approaches to the Museum's Engagement with the Local Community". For further information, call 01-6633579 or check out the website at www.irishmuseums.org"You must have your strategic plan, you must have your collections policy, you need your project manager and your exhibitions designer," says Peter Walsh, former curator of the Guinness Museum and a passionate advocate of a museum for Dublin. "But above all, you need to tell the stories of the city. When you work out what your themes are, you know what your stories are going to be - and then you need to find the voices to tell those stories in a meaningful way, thereby giving people back their history."
Walsh is himself a magical storyteller and a repository of myriad fascinating scraps of information about Dublin's past lives. He talks about stone heads carved in the shape of fertility goddess Ceres (many of which have disappeared), a rattle which was thrown at the Duke of Wellington when he arrived at the Theatre Royal in 1821 (now in the National Museum Collins Barracks), the head of Nelson from the Pillar (right), currently in the Gilbert Library on Pearse Street.
Such objects spark vital human connections, recognition of our shared common experience, says Walsh. Then there are the stories which, for all our fluency with narrative, we have never fully told. Walsh recalls a little-known biographical account from 1821. It was written by an old man who, in his youth in the 1770s, had played football in the streets of the Liberties with a black boy.
"The story goes," he says, "that the son of the emperor of Morocco had been kidnapped by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery in the Mediterranean. He apparently had a distinguishing birthmark on his behind - so an ad was put in the newspapers looking for this child. Now, a sugar baker in Crane Street bought a black child from a Liverpool slave trader to work in the bakery in Dublin. This little kid was taken in by the family of the man who wrote the story."
In due course, the baker spotted the ad in the newspaper, rushed home and asked the African child to strip and - lo and behold - there was the birthmark.
"We don't know the end of the story," says Walsh, "but there are lots of people living in Dublin now who would be very interested in those kinds of connections. The whole point of having this treasury of stories is to tell them - and to be aware that things are constantly changing. In 50 years' time, what's happening now will be history, and if we don't preserve that history . . . well, thankfully there's great recording now about the Jewish history of Clanbrassil Street and so forth, how all that heritage is being preserved. All these stories are important."
And as Walsh points out, it's not all sweetness and light. There's a story to be told about the Dublin which somewhat callously carried on its business as usual during the Great Famine, while the rest of the country starved. If we're going to tell the story of Dublin we need to tell it warts and all.
"It's a very complex city, as all cities are," he says. "There are a million Dublins carried around in the heads of the people who live here." And if we don't preserve and represent them, they may disappear forever.
The Irish Times
www.buckplanning.ie
You might imagine that Ireland is up to its elbows in museums. And we do have a plethora of highly regarded specialist collections, from the Famine Museum at Strokestown, Co Roscommon, to the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin; from the Irish National Stud and Horse Museum in Kildare to the Ulster Folklore and Transport Museum in Hollywood, Co Down. There are the wonderful Waterford Museum of Treasures and the Museum of Country Life in Co Mayo. But what we don't have - what, in truth, many of us don't even miss - is a museum for the city of Dublin.
Most Dubliners are probably blissfully unaware that the Dublin Civic Museum, which was housed in the former City Assembly House on South William Street, has been closed for about five years now. The museum died a quiet death after a long slide into apathy and neglect; but even in its heyday, it hardly qualified as one of the city's premier attractions.
If Dublin is serious about its aspiration to become one of Europe's top tourist destinations, however, shouldn't we have a museum to tell the history of our capital? Definitely, says Paul Doyle of the Irish Museums Association (IMA) - and not just for the tourists. "We've been pushing for a museum of Dublin for probably seven or eight years at this stage," he says. "We think that, like any capital city, it has stories to tell. Serious cities around the world all have their own museums, and the people of Dublin deserve one as well."
The IMA, which has a seat on Dublin City Council's Strategic Policy Committee on Youth, Art and Sport, is about to deliver to the council yet another submission which will make these and other points in favour of its proposal. "The council invited us to do this, which is a reasonable start," says Doyle. It will, nevertheless, be an uphill climb. Ask the average Dubliner about museums and they'll point to the National Museum, the National Gallery, the National Library, the Hugh Lane, Kilmainham Gaol, the Dublin Jewish Museum - even, perhaps, to the Guinness Hopstore, to Dublinia and to Viking Splash. Fine institutions all, but none of them is doing the job of a city museum, simply because none of them is a city museum.
So what should a city museum be doing? "City museums," says Hugh Maguire of the Heritage Council, "have a particular role to play because cities are always places where people are moving in and moving out - places for discourse and the exchange of ideas. We're inclined to think of that as a modern phenomenon - but down through the centuries, Dublin has been the interface for all that cultural interchange. And there's nowhere where that story is actually presented, either for the people who live here or for the thousands and thousands of newcomers to the city in recent years.
"You only see what you get in Dublin - and there's very little to even tell you what you're seeing. You see Georgian architecture and bits of the river and so on; but there's very little that actually explains it to you. There's no one to interpret the town planning or the growth of the city. There are sporadic exhibitions here and there in the various institutions, but they don't consider the history of the city as a single narrative," says Maguire.
ONE OF THE first questions which would have to be decided is how wide-ranging this narrative should be. Traditionally, Dublin has been regarded as "the city between the canals", but in recent years, it has spread its wings much further, and shows every sign of continuing to do so. There's also the question of how a collection would be arranged - should it start with the oldest signs of settlement and move forwards, or start with the city everyone can recognise and move backwards in time, turning a museum visit into an exercise in celebratory excavation? Should it concentrate on preservation and heritage, or try to document change by targeting the various immigrant cultures whose members are just beginning to make their cultural marks on the city?
Such questions would need to be thoroughly aired and debated if a civic museum were to be truly "civic". But first, as Paul Doyle points out, we need to make a definite commitment to a city museum; there's not much point in people working out, for example, a comprehensive collections policy if the whole project comes to nought once again. How difficult can it be to get such a commitment in place?
Other cities have done it: at one end of the spectrum, Beijing has just spent $150 million (€101 million) on a brand-new, seven-storey keynote building to house its history, with 13 themed exhibitions including a full-sized reconstruction of an old business street. Closer to home, most of the larger European cities have urban museums, including Liverpool, Glasgow and Luxembourg, whose Musee d'Histoire de la Ville de Luxembourg, situated in four beautifully restored buildings in the old city, prides itself on its modernist touches and cutting-edge interactive displays.
There are clearly as many blueprints for city museums as there are plans for city transport systems - but the message for anyone setting up a city museum in the 21st century seems to be: do it properly or don't do it at all. "Museums must fulfil a full range of purposes," says Hugh Maguire. "Every museum worth its salt needs vast amounts of storage space, properly climate-controlled rooms, rooms for documentation, rooms for education. Two or three front-of-house rooms just won't solve the problem."
Geraldine Walsh of Dublin Civic Trust points to the private museums in London - including Sir John Soane's mind-boggling life-sized cabinet of curiosities in Holborn, or the Geffrye Museum in Shoreditch, which presents a series of domestic interiors from the Elizabethan era to the present-day - as offering constructive examples of what could be done in Dublin. "When you come out of the Geffrye, everything you see in London is more meaningful to you. The city is a different place," she says. "Children go in and learn about, say, Windsor chairs. They draw them and maybe model them with cardboard and little bits of timber."
This is the kind of "hands-on" approach which, Walsh suggests, helps bring history to life. "What has happened in Dublin is that there's a total deficit between the eye and the place. Wealth has overtaken us over the past 20 years, so that we're in the process of discarding everything." She suggests that current trends in interior design, such as the idea of the "minimalist household", are exacerbating the problem. "Where before, objects were packed away in boxes somewhere, now people are getting rid of almost everything. The mark of a sophisticated society is that the collective memory is recorded in all its facets, from folklore right through to art and music."
SO IF A CITY museum is such a good thing, why haven't we got one in Dublin? Some say it's because we haven't evolved to the stage where we can take a cool, balanced look at our history. Others point to an overall archaeological bias in Irish museums culture. "If it's not dug out of the ground, the system isn't interested," says Hugh Maguire. "We have this problem with arts and crafts in Ireland as well - and in literature. Priority is given to certain areas, and from the 18th century up to now, priority has been given to the antiquarian in Irish studies. Whereas quite commonplace artefacts from earlier periods are seen as rarefied and worthy of scholarly regard, there's an attitude which verges on contempt for the tangible culture of more recent times."
As the Irish Museums Association gears up for its annual conference, which begins in Wexford today, one of its keynote speakers might well agree with those sentiments. The head of English heritage and former director of the British science museum, Neil Cossons, has spent many years trying to persuade the powers that be to save the architecture of the industrial revolution, from maintenance depots through workers' cottages to dark, satanic mills - with mixed results.
One of the points he will be making in his address is that museums have moved "from the twilight to the spotlight". Cossons will examine the tenacity of the whole idea of museums, which, he says, is one of the longest-lasting cultural phenomena in human history. "Part of it has to do with the fact that museums are capable of reflecting back to people something about their own lives. There seems to be a need on the part of communities to have their past about them. It's a very powerful human emotion and we now have the wealth, prosperity and intelligence to be able to do it."
Cossons identifies the desire for city museums as a significant trend in this ongoing boom. Liverpool and Bristol are building new ones, he says, and the Museum of London is undergoing a major expansion and overhaul. The case for a city museum can't, as a glance at Dublin City Council's excellent website will show, but made in isolation. Supporters will have to argue their point against supporters of other initiatives, which range from the biodiversity survey 2008-2012 through fair-trade fortnight to the provision of new football pitches and the ban on heavy good vehicles. Dublin, seen from this wide perspective, is a multi-layered, chaotic, ever-changing slice of life. But then, isn't that exactly why we need a museum of the city?
The Irish Museums Association's annual conference begins today in Wexford and continues until March 2nd. The theme is "New Approaches to the Museum's Engagement with the Local Community". For further information, call 01-6633579 or check out the website at www.irishmuseums.org"You must have your strategic plan, you must have your collections policy, you need your project manager and your exhibitions designer," says Peter Walsh, former curator of the Guinness Museum and a passionate advocate of a museum for Dublin. "But above all, you need to tell the stories of the city. When you work out what your themes are, you know what your stories are going to be - and then you need to find the voices to tell those stories in a meaningful way, thereby giving people back their history."
Walsh is himself a magical storyteller and a repository of myriad fascinating scraps of information about Dublin's past lives. He talks about stone heads carved in the shape of fertility goddess Ceres (many of which have disappeared), a rattle which was thrown at the Duke of Wellington when he arrived at the Theatre Royal in 1821 (now in the National Museum Collins Barracks), the head of Nelson from the Pillar (right), currently in the Gilbert Library on Pearse Street.
Such objects spark vital human connections, recognition of our shared common experience, says Walsh. Then there are the stories which, for all our fluency with narrative, we have never fully told. Walsh recalls a little-known biographical account from 1821. It was written by an old man who, in his youth in the 1770s, had played football in the streets of the Liberties with a black boy.
"The story goes," he says, "that the son of the emperor of Morocco had been kidnapped by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery in the Mediterranean. He apparently had a distinguishing birthmark on his behind - so an ad was put in the newspapers looking for this child. Now, a sugar baker in Crane Street bought a black child from a Liverpool slave trader to work in the bakery in Dublin. This little kid was taken in by the family of the man who wrote the story."
In due course, the baker spotted the ad in the newspaper, rushed home and asked the African child to strip and - lo and behold - there was the birthmark.
"We don't know the end of the story," says Walsh, "but there are lots of people living in Dublin now who would be very interested in those kinds of connections. The whole point of having this treasury of stories is to tell them - and to be aware that things are constantly changing. In 50 years' time, what's happening now will be history, and if we don't preserve that history . . . well, thankfully there's great recording now about the Jewish history of Clanbrassil Street and so forth, how all that heritage is being preserved. All these stories are important."
And as Walsh points out, it's not all sweetness and light. There's a story to be told about the Dublin which somewhat callously carried on its business as usual during the Great Famine, while the rest of the country starved. If we're going to tell the story of Dublin we need to tell it warts and all.
"It's a very complex city, as all cities are," he says. "There are a million Dublins carried around in the heads of the people who live here." And if we don't preserve and represent them, they may disappear forever.
The Irish Times
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